The BEST Methods for Inverting & Sharpening Film Scans

The final video in my film scanning tutorial series, but probably not the last video about film scanners. In this video I cover multiple ways you can invert your scans, and a few ways of properly sharpening them to get the best results.
Software I recommend:
PAID: www.negativela...
FREE: grain2pixel.com/
FREEER : do it ursef brah
Really there are probably better ways to sharpen or invert but the BEST way to do it is to use the method that works the best for you!
Alex Burke's inversion method:
• Manual Inversion of Co...
• Inverting Color Negati...
INSANE ARTICLE about PSF deconvolution : / measuring-a-diffuserca...
INSANE high level blog about a ton of photography topics, mostly sharpening
www.strollswit...
I show this article in the vid; www.strollswit...

[@gerromy222]

Thanks for sharing !

[@Nitidus]

You can't imagine the relief I felt seeing someone else struggle through the same stuff with the same scanner. Though you dug way deeper in some regards and already saved me a lot of time. Those videos mention a lot of possibilities, a lot of methods and things to try, but for me, they mostly helped me narrow down a lot what makes sense to still try. But I've also encountered new problems, like the fact that in my entire country there's not a single seller of "ANR" glass who would cut the glass down as precisely as yours did. Maybe I'm "lucky" and my scanner's plane of focus is also right on the scanner glass (where it's not supposed to be). Then I could just use much easier to attain pieces of ANR glass. Loved the method using a ruler which I'm going to try tomorrow.

[@Nitidus]

Update: My V550 also seems to be sharpest at the scanner glass level. The increase in sharpness is actually insane. Up until now I was starting to even doubt my Nikon lenses, but it was the scanner's focus all along. 35mm scans look SO MUCH BETTer immediately! I tested it by laying my most recent roll of film directly onto the glass - luckily I got it really flat while drying, so I don't have Newton rings on most frames even without any glass. Today I orderd anti-reflective glass and it's really hard to find a shop that says whether the glass is chemically etched or using a foil layer. Also minimum sizes are a problem. I finally was able to order a 10x28 cm piece, hopefully it'll fit despite being wider than the backlight. Also, I just cannot believe how using the official Epson film holders and following the official instructions manual can possibly make your scans look so much worse. It's insane.

[@c.augustin]

And then there's Filmomat SmartConvert (similar pricing to Negative Lab Pro). In my experience with camera scans (Olympus Pen F digital in hi-res pixel-shift mode) it is faster, sometimes better results than NLP2 (but NLP3 now gives me better results than NLP2 with some problematic scans, especially with Portra 400). On pixel/grain level, NLP does a better job than SmartConvert, because it relies on ACR raw processing, while SmartConvert uses its own engine, as does FilmLab (which shows the same problems, so results might depend on the camera used).

[@Marcos-p1g4g]

Love this videos

[@OrelRussia]

Thank you for the video! Your manual inversion looks logical but in my experience it's still not on par with good examples from special software. I have a Noritsu scanner. It is able to produce not only jpegs and tiffs but raws as well. How many hours (actually, days and weeks I guess) I spent trying to manually correct them, so they look like really good scans! Unfortunately, no matter what I did, the color rendition of corresponding jpegs/tiffs out of the native software looks more natural and overall better.

[@choiinchul4693]

This is awesome. you save my 100USD for purchasing NLP!!!